4/19/03 M101 is another beautiful spiral.

I took this image at F10 and some of the galaxy is clipped, should have used the F6.3 focal reducer for this large object. Once again I struggled with the 201xt and failed to make it work correctly, so the image was made with 60 second unguided images. I inspected the whole set of 135 frames and discarded 50 of them with eggy stars (and 3 with satelite trails!). Given the focal ratio of F10 I guess 85 frame with good round stars isn't too bad, I'm sure the keeper rate would have been higher had the focal reducer been in play.